New book on phone hacking scandal reveals depth of relationships between Scotland Yard and News of the World

MARK COLVIN: There's been less debate about the way private companies are able to scoop up vast amounts of metadata about you.

One of them is the shopping centre giant, Westfield, with a vast network of CCTV cameras and other security equipment in malls that most Australians visit often.

Four Corners revealed last year that Westfield's privacy policy lets it collect data from your phone or tablet, including usage, location and type of device.

Now, few may be aware of it but one of the central figures in Britain's phone hacking scandal is now the man who controls that surveillance network.

Since late last year, the former assistant commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police, John Yates, has been head of security for Westfield.

In a new book about the News of the World phone hacking scandal which he broke, the journalist Nick Davies examines the crucial relationship between the paper and the police.

On the phone from London, I asked him first how that relationship generally worked.

NICK DAVIES: The main thing that changes hands with corruption is cash. But yes, there were very, very cosy relationships between the News of the World in particular and very senior police officers at Scotland Yard.

And so at one point the boss, the Metropolitan commissioner, Sir John Stevens, retired from his job and was then given a weekly column in the News of the World, for which he was paid £7,000 a shot. So he would sort of talk to a reporter who would ghost write it for him.

Now that isn't in itself corrupt but it tells you about the cosiness between the two organisations. And then, of course, at a slightly later stage when the police discover that this newspaper has been intercepting the voicemail messages of people in the Royal household and Royal family and they have to start investigating, the police don't do the job properly.

And it's a complicated picture which I have described in the book but any reasonable spectator is going to look at that and say, does this corruption make a difference? Does this cosiness - which isn't in itself corrupt - but does the cosiness make a difference? Has that got anything to do with Scotland Yard's failure to deal properly with crime at the News of the World?

MARK COLVIN: At the very heart of the story, in fact, is the police's failure to investigate beyond a very tight-knit group of people who had been hacked. And there's a man called John Yates, who's now in charge of security for Westfield in Australia, who at one stage comes out and basically exonerates News Corp and puts your entire investigation into question. What's going on at that stage?

NICK DAVIES: Okay. So we need to get the facts clear. So the original inquiry took place because the News of the World were found to have targeted possibly the one group of people in Britain who are more important than Rupert Murdoch, which was the Royal family.

So the police investigated. They did a straight job on investigating the interception of Royal voicemail and then shut it down. The officers who were involved in that were from the counter-terrorism branch because it was the Royal family and they were probably justified in saying, well, we've done our bit of the job.

But at that point Scotland Yard should have given the job to a different squad and completed it. At that stage they'd found eight victims of the hacking. When finally we got to the truth, we discovered there were 5,500 victims. So that was the scale on which Scotland Yard failed to get to the truth of the case.

MARK COLVIN: But coming back to John Yates: there's a day when he comes out and says, "Well, we've told them. All the people who needed to be told about phone hacking we've told." And then a few hours later Scotland Yard puts out a press release saying, "We're in the process of telling lots more people." What was going on there?

NICK DAVIES: During the phase when John Yates was in charge, Scotland Yard repeatedly made false statements to press, public and parliament. And I've tried to describe in great detail how that happened and why it happened. But it was extremely wrong that that went on and...

Yes, so when we started publishing stories about this, saying there were thousands of victims of this hacking, John Yates stepped forward and said that he'd established the facts. He had claimed to do that within, like, 12 hours of being asked to look at it - whereas this is a huge case - and proceeded to rubbish our story and to say there was no need to reopen the investigation.

The statement that he made on that day, as I've described in the book, is riddled with error. And having made that he then stuck to that line and no matter how much we produced he repeated it. I mean, even sitting in front of select committees in parliament: he misled them.

MARK COLVIN: So what does that say about what the police were doing? I mean, do you actually connect that back to this relationship between the police and the organisation?

NICK DAVIES: I guess at the end of the day I can't look inside John Yates' head and find out why he did that.

So Lord Justice Leveson attempted to come to grips with all this and his conclusion was that Yates had been defensive because it was a newspaper, a left-of-centre newspaper were attacking Scotland Yard over a job that they had done in the past. So he was just being defensive of the police organisation.

Maybe Lord Justice Leveson is right. I... It's very difficult when you actually come down to motive to give a definitive answer.

MARK COLVIN: But what about...

NICK DAVIES: I, I suppose the point here is so that anybody looking at it is bound to ask themselves whether that cosy collaboration that was going on between Murdoch's newspaper and Scotland Yard was a factor in the various kinds of failure which emerged from the police.

MARK COLVIN: And was it a two-way transaction? I think there were people who were going from the News of the World or from News Corp to the police to do their public relations for them?

NICK DAVIES: Yes. There were quite a lot of former Murdoch journalists working in the press bureau at Scotland Yard. Certainly there was a friendly relationship.

I mean, it's kind of tricky to pull apart the legitimate and the illegitimate because on the one hand reporters like myself like to be able to get access to people in the public sector, including police officers, so that we can see what they're doing and how they're spending their money and how they're using their power.

But clearly here it got out of control and in some parts was distinctly corrupt.

MARK COLVIN: Nick Davies, author of Hack Attack: How the Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch.